October's Witch Creek fire has come and gone, but the cities of Poway and Escondido are just now realizing the extent of the cost to repair its damage.

Poway has spent about $1.1 million on erosion control and expects the bill to keep climbing.

Escondido is rushing to repair Lake Wohlford's lifeline, the 14-mile Escondido Canal, where mudslides and rock slides have blocked the waterway. Work crews also plan to install erosion-control equipment inside the city next week. All that work is projected to cost $530,000, some of which can be recovered from homeowners insurance.

Poway began its erosion-prevention program while the burned grounds were still smoldering, said Danis Bechter, the city's storm water coordinator.

At Lake Poway, the city laid 50 gravel bags as makeshift dams on the hillsides to keep sediment and debris from washing into the reservoir.

Workers also installed a 2-to 3-foot-high curtain along one mile of the lake's shoreline to block out debris and silt that escaped the dams, Bechter said.

Both lines of defense did their jobs, Poway City Manager Rod Gould said.

“Every time we tested the water, the samples looked good,” he said.

The city also shored up land around 80 homes in the Green Valley, Heritage and High Valley neighborhoods of north Poway, where the hillsides had burned. Work crews staked hay bales in the ground to keep water from flowing to the properties and sprayed hydroseed behind the bales so new grass can filter out debris and ash, Bechter said.

Lake Poway erosion control cost about $633,000, Gould said. Work around homes cost about $271,000, which the city hopes to recover from the federal or state government. An additional $181,500 was spent on miscellaneous items, such as masks and equipment.

Gould said he expects the expenses to keep climbing because erosion-control equipment needs to be cleaned after each rain.

In Escondido, city crews are cleaning up the blocked Escondido Canal, which transports water from Lake Henshaw to Lake Wohlford, a reservoir that supplies 30 percent of the city's water.

The fire had burned the brush along the banks of the canal, and when the first storm came in December, slides blocked a canal tunnel and other open parts of the waterway, canal superintendent Carl Burgess said.

The canal begins at Lake Henshaw and runs through the La Jolla, Rincon and San Pasqual Indian reservations before reaching Lake Wohlford, traversing a rugged course that can be reached only by foot in some places.

The canal experienced a mudslide in 2005 that blocked six miles of the waterway and took six months to clear.

“I've been here for 26 years, I've never seen it so solid – 7 foot of silt and sand,” Burgess said. “It took three weeks to clean up. We don't put people inside tunnels digging. We pumped water to wash the sand out. It's time-consuming.”

With the tunnel cleared, workers are cleaning up the rock slides in the open waterway, Burgess said. “That's pick-and-shovel work only. We can't get equipment into it.”

Although the canal's $226,000 cleanup will not be completed until mid-February, city workers are hoping to finish erosion-control work within Escondido next week.

The city plans to lay gravel bags and fiber rolls on the slope next to the Vineyard Municipal Golf Course because the fire had burned off the vegetation there, said Bud Oliveira, the city's construction project manager. The recent rains had not caused landslides.

But the roughly 5 acres on the slope will not be revegetated artificially because plants already are growing back naturally, he said.

The erosion-prevention work on the golf course slope is expected to cost $5,000.

Escondido also has fronted about $300,000 to help 21 homeowners on both sides of Interstate 15 in the Sonata and Lomas Serenas developments to demolish their burned structures. That work should be completed by next week.

The city expects to recover demolition costs from homeowners insurance, Oliveira said.